Erasmus Research Institute of Management - ERIM Events

The Effects of Circular and Linear Time Orientations on Personal Saving Estimates and Savings Behavior

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:15:00 GMT

Speakers:
Utpal Dholakia (Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University)

Location: G03-21
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

We examined effects of savings methods derived from cultural differences in circular and linear time orientations of consumers. Our results show that Chinese and American consumers differ in their use of time orientation-based savings approaches, and in amounts saved. Although American personal finance experts think of the linear savings method as more effective and are more likely to recommend it to consumers, in our studies, American consumers using a circular savings method provided an average of 74% higher savings estimates and saved an average of 78% more money. Our findings are robust to different operationalizations of time orientations, and cannot be explained solely through the differing emphases of consumers on the present vs. the future in these two orientations. The efficacy of the circular savings method arises from a combination of greater implementation planning and a lower future optimism regarding saving money.

Utpal Dholakia is a William S. Mackey, Jr. and Verne F. Simons Distinguished Associate Professor of Management at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has a master's degree in psychology, and a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Michigan, a master's degree in operations research from the Ohio State University, and a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from the University of Bombay.

His research interests lie in studying motivational psychology of consumers and online marketing issues such as virtual communities and online auctions. He also studies relational aspects of consumer behavior. He has published in a number of marketing and management journals, and consults with firms in financial services, energy, health-care and other industries.

This research seminar is organised by the Erasmus Centre for Marketing of Innovation (ECMI).

Contact information:

Dr. G. Liberali

Manufacturing Creativity

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:00:00 GMT

Speakers:
Bregje van Eekelen (Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Location: T3-42
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

In this paper, I trace the social history of “brainstorming” from 1938 through 1968 in US management handbooks, workplace posters, and newspaper articles. The early history of this nowadays commonplace term tells a story of the imbrications of creative ideation – as a specific and value-generating knowledge practice – within the US military and manufacturing industries. While the initial commodification, institutionalization, and, later on, normalization of brainstorming foreshadows the emergence of a so-called knowledge economy, the particular history of this knowledge-generating practice suggests a not yet severed link between tangible and intangible spheres. Brainstorming did cast thinking and ideation as an activity that resisted the utilitarian logics of everyday work, but it was within the manufacturing industry, within the Navy, that the appreciation for creative thinking came into its own.

Bregje van Eekelen is assistant professor “Historical Culture and Cultural Difference” at the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication at Erasmus University. She is affiliated with the sections Metahistory and World History.
After her studies in Cultural Anthropology and Social and Institutional Economics at Utrecht University, she pursued a graduate degree at University of California, Santa Cruz under the supervision of Professor S. Harding (Anthropology). Her training included coursework in Anthropology, History of Consciousness, and Philosophy. Her dissertation is titled The Social Life of Ideas: Economies of Knowledge.

Both her dissertation and her current project (Brainstorms: Fragments of a Mental Discourse) use a combination of historical and anthropological approaches to the study of traveling concepts, most notably concepts that are situated on the boundary between culture and economy. They include concepts such as ‘marketplace of ideas,’ ‘intangible assets,’ ‘knowledge economy,’ and ‘creativity.’ She studies the socio-historical conditions of the emergence of these concepts; the knowledge practices, bureaucratic categories, and narratives through which they are stabilized and kept in place; and how they structure common sense, both in the past and in the present.

Her research and teaching expertise include the anthropology of knowledge; modern societies and their genealogies; history of social science; language & war; work, governance, ideology; economic history and anthropology. At Erasmus, she teaches courses in the philosophy of history (Theory of History, Historical Culture) and in world history (Histories of Emerging Markets). She also teaches in the MA Research Workshop “Nation, History, and Memory.” Van Eekelen previously taught theory and history of anthropology, ethnographies of capitalism, and histories and cultural aspects of trade, travel, and tourism (University of California, Santa Cruz).
Her research has been funded by numerous grants. Amongst them, a UC Chancellor’s Fellow Grant, UvA Employability Grant, Catharina van Tussenbroek Fellowship, Henriette Sara De Lanoy Meijer Fellowship, a Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Fellowship, a Nationale Talentenbeurs, a Fulbright NAF scholarship, a Vrouwe van Renswoude Fellowship, and grants from The University of California Regents.
She is a research associate at the Center for Historical Culture. She was previously a Chancellor’s Fellow of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and she worked as an academic editor (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis).

The Business History Seminar has been made possible by financial support from the Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM) and the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication.

Download paper

Contact information:

Marten Boon

To Delegate or Not to Delegate to Stock Markets? The Case of Boards with Related Industry Expertise

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Speakers:
Bunyamin Onal (J. Mack Robinson College of Business , Georgia State University)

Location: T3-42
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

I examine the extent to which boards with expertise in the firm’s related industries, i.e., downstream (customer) or upstream (supplier) industries, delegate their monitoring and advisory functions to stock markets. Directors from related industries (DRIs) are argued to acquire information about product markets more readily. This, in turn, is predicted to alleviate the need for stock-based incentives particularly for firms with greater dependence on product markets and those with less informative stock prices. The evidence documented in this paper is largely consistent with these predictions. A number of additional tests suggest that this evidence is not likely to be explained by the potential conflict of interests between the firm’s stockholders and DRIs. Hence, I conclude that boards with related industry expertise delegate to stock markets to an optimally lesser extent due to their informational advantages.

Contact information:

Myra Lissenberg

The Co-Evolution of Industries, Social Movements and Institutions: A Study of Wind Power

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:00:00 GMT

Speakers:
Desiree Pacheco (School of Business Administration, Portland State University)

Location: G3-26
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

This study examines the interdependencies between industry growth, social movements, and institutions in the context of the wind energy industry. We demonstrate that industry emergence can be characterized as a co-evolutionary process that is influenced by the actions of social movement organizations (SMOs), but that simultaneously impacts the structure of social movements by motivating the participation of new forms of SMOs. We characterize these new organizational forms as technology-focused SMOs and suggest that their distinct tactics for institutional change are necessary for the continued growth of the industry. Our findings have important implications for understanding the diversity and endogeneity of social movements and the complex character of industry emergence.

Contact information:

Carolien Heintjes

Stability of Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithms

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:30:00 GMT

Speakers:
Jingjing Zhang (Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota)

Location: T8-67
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

Recommender systems are becoming a standard component of many e-commerce sites. While much of the prior research has focused on predictive accuracy as the main measure of recommender systems performance, other metrics are becoming increasingly important. This work explores stability as a new measure of recommender systems performance. Stability is defined to measure the extent to which a recommendation algorithm provides predictions that are consistent with each other. Specifically, for a stable algorithm, adding some of the algorithm’s own predictions to the algorithm’s training data (for example, if these predictions were confirmed as accurate by users) would not invalidate or change the other predictions. While stability is an interesting theoretical property that can provide additional understanding about recommendation algorithms and their performance, stability is also a desired practical property for recommender systems, because unstable recommendations can potentially decrease users’ trust in recommender systems and, as a result, reduce users’ acceptance of recommendations. In this work, we also provide an extensive empirical evaluation of stability for six popular recommendation algorithms on four real-world datasets. Our results suggest that stability performance of individual recommendation algorithms is consistent across a variety of datasets and settings. In particular, we find that model-based recommendation algorithms consistently demonstrate higher stability than neighborhood-based collaborative filtering heuristics. In addition, we perform a comprehensive empirical analysis of many important factors (e.g., the sparsity of original rating data, normalization of input data, the number of new incoming ratings, the distribution of incoming ratings, the distribution of evaluation data, etc.) and report the impact they have on recommendation stability. Our analysis shows that some popular recommendation algorithms suffer from high degree of instability. Therefore, we further propose two novel meta-algorithms that can be used in conjunction with different traditional recommendation techniques to improve their stability. Our experimental results on real-world movie rating data demonstrate that the proposed approaches can achieve substantially higher stability as compared to the original recommendation algorithms, while, perhaps as importantly, providing additional improvements in their predictive accuracy as well.

Contact information:

Ingrid Waaijer

Optimal Policies for Recovering the Value of Consumer Returns

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:00:00 GMT

Speakers:
Paolo Letizia (SMEAL College of Business, Pennsylvania State University)

Location: T10-67
Type: ERIM Research Seminar

This paper characterizes an optimal returns policy between a manufacturer and a retailer who receives consumer returns. The manufacturer may take a costly hidden action that reduces the expected number of products returned by consumers, which when realized is hidden information known only to the retailer. When faced with consumer returns, the retailer must decide whether to send the product back to the manufacturer, who harvests a low salvage value, or to engage in costly refurbishment that permits the returned product to be resold as new. We find that the optimal returns policy entails a full refund by the manufacturer to the retailer of the wholesale price for any returns, as well as a bonus paid to the retailers that is decreasing in the number of returns to the manufacturer.

Contact information:

Dr. F. Sting